Diablo 3: 4th Anniversary

It’s amazing how the years go by so fast. From the error 37’s to the Auction House and then the dabbling hell that was Inferno. So much has changed since then and the game is so much better off for it. Just as Lord of Destruction made Diablo 2 great. So too did Reaper of Souls for Diablo 3.

Four years ago, we began a journey across Sanctuary that would forever alter the tide of the Eternal Conflict. In that time, millions of nephalem have stormed the gates of the High Heavens, taken down the Prime Evil, and collected more loot than a treasure goblin could hope to collect.

It’s been one hell of a journey, and we want to extend our heartfelt thanks to you for being with us every step of the way. Diablo III would not have become the game it is today without the support of our players, and we’re so thrilled to share the horrors, magic, and Legendary goodies Sanctuary has to offer with our community.

Comments

The first year of Diablo 3 was so awful at the time. I sincerely thought it was a waste of money. It had been put at the backseat in favor of other games at the time. But the core idea of D3 has changed a LOT since then, and when they announced the pending release of the expansion, I decided to give it another chance.

Oh hell did I make the right choice. It feels much less like the design flaws of old, and the game was actually playable for once. The improved loot system made targeted grinding obsolete; the introduction of bounties and nephalem rifts provided an alternate avenue to gain experience and loot; and ever since the intro of Seasons, Greater Rifts allowed you to push the limits of character builds. It’s been a bumpy initial ride, yes, but I don’t regret going back.

I don’t know, but I think I liked the original game more than RoS. I think RoS killed the idea of this being a Diablo game. D3 felt like a bad Diablo clone. In that Titan Quest or (especially) Path of Exile felt more like D3 than D3 did, but at least it felt like an ARPG.

RoS doesn’t even feel like a ARPG. Kind of like how the AH made the original D3 an Auction game, RoS has made D3 a mini game. Running around season 6 with my Marauder DH in a Greater Rift I feel like I’m playing some SC2 Arcade ‘DH defense’ map where you have to kill all the enemies before the timer runs out using turrets.

What happened to the campaign? It’s totally irrelevant. What happened to new Game +? What happened to wanting to start over to try new builds? There are just no player initiated challenges in this game anymore… Now you just wait for Blizzard to increase the power creep every season and push for the new highest rift… And if you find something in the game that works outside of this framework Blizzard will patch it out… That doesn’t sound anything like Diablo, or Diablo 2.

As for what I found most fun, it had to have been farming Crypt in Fields of Misery for Paragon 100 characters to prepare for the launch of RoS in Inferno 10 difficulty. That and playing with some of the Incgamers clan on launch night through the RoS campaign. Things kind of went downhill after that for the game IMO.

Hold on…. who is riding that demon?? is this a reveal of what is coming in the expansion pack! I am i naive and hopeful for a new expansion after 4 years of sticking with the only game worth investing time in!?

The community was salty because the game was shitty. Funny that people now say the salty community killed the game, when all those years the non detractors kept saying negative posts and comments didn’t matter & have no effect on anything!

Nope. What killed D3 was the “I’m such an arrogant knowitbetterthanthou, as if I’d be doing a kilo cocaine to breakfast”-stance of Wilson and PR in reaction to the criticism, blowing it up into a full, longlasting ‘Fanboi vs. Hater’-flamewar.

Though at this point, I’d only dare to say “killed” in direct regards to its predecessors outstanding longterm motivational achievement, which D3 has not achieved yet, as hungup on the necessity of additional content and mixing up the meta with patches to keep players motivated, as the game still is. Compared to other game franchises, D3 is well innerhalve normal lifespan parameters.

I’m afraid you should start applying vinegar and salt to your hat right now to make sure it’s edible by then… All new ideas and areas are in (free) patches nowadays, where they could have kept them back to release in a new expansion. Examples are Secheron and the cube.

Most fun moment? That was the first time we played the game with 4 guys on a couch with the PS3 version. That version is still the best, in my opinion. The gameplay is the vanilla game without the Auction House but with only some of the RoS extensions (nephelem glory, for instance). I stopped playing the game on the PC and started to play only on the console until the expansion was released on the PC. But I never found the fun as when playing with some guys on a single screen. Just about a month ago we did that again, still with this ‘old’ version (which is something you can not do on PC) and still had a real good time.

It’s a real pity they stopped supporting it with patches, which is the reason I didn’t buy the expansion for the PS3, but only for the PC. But it also means that if I want a real challenge, I can always start this version and see again for myself that the game has been far more challenging (especially when encountering missile or magic).

The original version with auction house kept my interest longer then ROS. Sure it was fun to be able to find a lot of legendary items but it got old real fast. It started to feel like some arcade game (gauntlet for example) I doubt there will be another expansion. There are a lot of rumours it was canned and we got some remnants with the latest patches. For now i moved on to Path of Exile. Something i wish i’d done sooner.

David Brevik would really be required, or at the very least devs from a purer arpg background. I think Blizzard really dropped the ball by revolving employees around from other genres to develop Diablo3. It’s nice to receive a ‘fresh’ perspective on a franchise, but radically changing the core to some bastardization of previous titles isn’t what the fans were looking forward towards.

my favorite moment was selling a Leoric’s Signet ring on the AH for 40mil gold, my first big sale and finally gave me the gold i needed for crafting stuff. before then it was a slog for gold at every point. kinda glad the AH is gone now, but sometimes i do miss it.

Looking at Blizzard, especially how they treat Diablo 3 with additional content, without mentioning any expansions I think that we have 3 options here: – they will simply let D3 die long and calm with additional content to keep current players still playing for some years to come – they will announce new expansion during Blizzcon – they will announce new D4

Yep, I now you can call me Captain Obvious 😀 I really hope for new D4 with mature content, more complex quest, and bigger areas for kill&explore. +18 will only help D4, and they should stop this nonsenses with wings, pets etc… For me it is empty content, I stopped playing D3 at the end of season 3, but sill cheeking out what is going on and hoping for some good news…

In that case I would prefer a D4… Going back to the mechanics of D2 but with upgraded graphics. Sure, D2 is fun. But it’s slow (don’t even look at the original Diablo… The time it took then to walk across town from level to level…). And the graphics are too low-res for a current ACTION-role-playing-game. Also some of the mechanics of the original Diablo were fun and perhaps should return: a warrior casting a firewall, though slowly, or a mage using a sword to smite a skeleton in slow motion…

Spending money and resources to build an expension for a game that is not up-to-date anymore is not a good idea. If they have ideas for the Diablo universe, they should build a new game and listen to the comments they have got the last 4 years on D3 and before that on the previous games from the gamers. Don’t listen to people who want to have a WOW game in the Diablo universe. Diablo is for Diablo (current and future) fans!

Most fun: pretty much everything before Greater Rifts. Game was a blast, even including “original Inferno.”

Least fun: everything after Greater Rifts, and all this weird crap with seasons and Horadric Caches and the game basically being on steroids.

It took me months of playing RoS with my limited schedule to get up to like, Torment IV/V.

It took me two days in Season something or other to get up to Torment 15 or Greater Rift some large number or whatever where I melted everything by holding down the right click button for Haunt as I zoned out and then logged out of the game. Yet another Blizzard experience where too much streamlining and amplifying took the fun out of it (looking at you, vanilla WoW vs. RotLK and later WoW)

I prefer D3 vanilla to RoS, although both have their charms. I just prefer the less frequent, higher quality drops in D3v. For example, I got 2 new legendary plans in D3v this week at P86. RoS, I’ve had all plans for some time. I play on xbox 360 so not the latedt version. I like the Mystic in RoS to remove some of the gear grind & playstyle variety is better but I just like the “feel” of my monk in D3v over RoS. It feels “powerful” on Inferno M5, while on RoS Inferno T6 it feels “tough” but not powerful although both do fine. Over the long haul (playing since 2013), I find D3v is what I play, while RoS not so much.